Russell Maliphant is having a hip-hop moment. His arms and torso are tensely angled, his weight is hunkered down, and warps and jerks are passing through his body like a robotic Mexican wave. For a 50-year-old novice – especially one as unassuming and quietly spoken as Maliphant – it's an unexpectedly convincing imitation of street style. But what makes this hip-hop moment so special, and so bizarre, is the location.

I've arranged to meet the choreographer in the sculpture garden of the Rodin museum in Paris. In this high-walled sanctum, where the silence of the statues is broken only by birdsong, the two of us are as far from the inner-city vibe of street dance as it's possible to be. Yet, as Maliphant demonstrates, it was here that he drew inspiration for his latest work, The Rodin Project, departing from the burnished, fluid elegance of his trademark style into the language of popping and breaking.

"I've loved Rodin's work since I first came to this museum years ago," says Maliphant, standing among these monumental bronzes. "I felt there were so many qualities in his figures – the tension, the line, the flow – that I could use in dance. But when I began work on the piece, I realised some of his sculptures were so massive, so grounded, that I wasn't getting the weight of them in my movement."

So Maliphant went along to Breakin' Convention, London's street dance festival, "and saw this dancer Dickson, who reminded me of a Rodin – the sense of gravity, the freezing, the waves of movement. There were other elements in hip-hop that made sense to me, too, like the positions held on the floor, the torsion through the body. I'm discovering a whole new language."

As Maliphant walks me around the sculptures, it's fascinating to see them through his eyes. The Burghers of Calais is for him a lesson in grouping. He points out the way Rodin's six gaunt, heroic figures are facing each other. "The energy flows from one to the next much more than if they were all facing in one direction. And that flow is continued in the draping of their robes. Even though it's frozen movement, it's very dynamic."

Maliphant points out the extraordinary realism of certain details, the rope of a leg muscle, the tautness of a tendon. Yet he's equally impressed by how the 19th-century French sculptor "amplified the expressiveness" of his figures by enlarging their hands and feet, and exaggerating the twist of a torso. How have all these elements made it into the bodies of his own six dancers? "Sometimes, we've allowed actual gestures and positions to be in there momentarily, but we've tried to avoid being literal. It's much more about groupings, or larger qualities like groundedness or weight."

We move on to The Gates of Hell – a gigantic vision of torment. Maliphant gazes in awe. "It's amazing, all these figures twisting and falling and pouring through this vertical surface." Tommy Franzen, another of his hip-hop dancers, is also an experienced climber, and Maliphant has deployed his skills in a section inspired by the gates in which dancers clamber across a giant steel set. "They're incredibly strong," he says of his cast. "They bring stuff to this piece I could never do."

The lure of such new languages has always been powerful for Canadian-born Maliphant. He began his career with Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet (now Birmingham Royal Ballet) in 1981, and even at that early stage was a natural maverick. "While everyone else would be warming up by doing the splits and having their legs up to here, I'd be wafting round the room doing tai chi. I'd always been interested in eastern philosophy. And I thought tai chi was beautiful: the quality of it, the softness."

His curiosity about the world outside ballet grew even stronger when SWRB began to focus on runs of 19th-century classics such as Swan Lake. Frustrated by the lack of creativity, Maliphant joined the small independent ballet company Dance Advance. If giving up the security of a big institution felt like a risky move, it was nothing compared to his next project. Lloyd Newson, the brilliantly angry young man of modern dance and the director of DV8, had noticed Maliphant, and tempted him to perform in 1988's riveting Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men.

The subject matter was raw enough: the fantasy life of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen. But what left Maliphant gobsmacked was Newson's style of movement. "I'd never seen dance like it. It was pretty brutal, a lot of violent running and jumping and catching and falling. But I was thinking – I could stay inside ballet, chipping away at the same line, trying to do an extra pirouette, but there is a world of dance out there I know nothing about. It felt liberating." There were, he recalls, no rules. "In ballet, if the leg is bent and the foot isn't pointed, that's nearly always wrong. But here I was suddenly being asked how I thought a shape should be. It was quite an eye-opener. It really got me thinking."

Laurie Booth was his next mentor. Trained in the Brazilian martial art of capoeira, with its athletic balancing and eel-like twists and turns, Booth was also an expert improvisor. Maliphant says it was learning this "instant choreography" that gave him the confidence to embark on his own career as a dance-maker. His style was characterised by a Zen-like stillness and a boneless fluidity; in collaborations with Michael Hulls, a lighting designer with a genius for gilding, sculpting and shadowing movement, Maliphant's choreography made dancers look beautiful and interesting in ways no one had seen before. His works were taken into the repertory of other companies, including the Royal Ballet and Ballet Boyz, and he created several projects with the ballerina Sylvie Guillem.

As we move on to Rodin's drawings, I'm reminded of how Serge Diaghilev used to take fledgling choreographers around art galleries, so that they could learn about composition and line from the old masters. Some of Rodin's sketches are, frankly, erotic. Maliphant laughs. "Rodin would pin a note on his studio door when he was with some of his models saying, 'I'm worshipping at the altar.' But I like the fact that the drawings are much less familiar. That makes them easier for me to use." As we walk past the magisterial figure of The Thinker, he grins. "You see what I mean? There's no way I could use that. It's too well known."

Hulls' lighting will reflect Rodin's habit of going into his studio late at night and walking round his figures with a candle, while the music, by Russia's Alexander Zekke, was inspired by composers who were contemporaries of the sculptor; there's a piece by Massenet scored for double bass that Maliphant says has "real Rodin weight". The sculptor's unusual methods also find their way into the dance, in particular "his technique of assembling and reconstituting elements in different ways, putting the legs from one figure on to the torso of another".

The raw expressiveness of Rodin's work is certainly new territory for Maliphant, whose choreography has tended towards a more abstract, rarefied handling of emotion. "It's completely challenged the vocabulary of my movement," he says, his voice full of energy and conviction, as we end our tour at Rodin's sculpture of Balzac.

Maliphant stands transfixed before this towering figure, his eyes as ever seeking how to translate what he sees into dance. "Look at the angle he's standing at," he says. "He's like some huge, gnarly tree. It's fantastic."